A Talk with Louis Fishman on Late Ottoman Palestine: Jews and Palestinians between Istanbul and Jerusalem

Speaker: Louis Fishman is an associate professor in the history department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of the book Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland (Edinburgh University Press, January 2020). His academic work focuses on late Ottoman Palestine, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also regularly contributes to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where he writes about Turkish and Israeli politics while providing political commentary to other international media and policy outlets. He divides his time between New York, Istanbul, and Tel Aviv.

In this talk, Professor Fishman will summarize his book, Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908-1914: Claiming the Homeland (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), discussing how he has used it as a launching point to further his research on Arab Jews, Palestinian relations with the Jewish Community and other Arabs within the Empire, and how Ottoman Zionists tried to expand their movement to Istanbul. However, with growing antisemitism wrapped in conspiracy theories taking hold in the Ottoman capital, Jews, non-Zionist and Zionist alike, would begin to have their loyalty called into question.

Event co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, The Program on Turkey| CDDRL, and the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies Program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.